Diversity and inclusion have emerged as critical issues across society, and they are particularly relevant to the natural resources sector, given the historically low proportion of women and people of differing backgrounds and abilities in our industry. We know that we will become a stronger, more innovative and resilient company as we continue to attract a spectrum of people of different cultural backgrounds, genders, ages and life experiences to our company.
We have begun a multi-year effort to increase our understanding of related challenges and opportunities, improve diversity literacy internally, align business processes and structures to be more inclusive, develop and implement a metrics framework, and ultimately improve performance in this area.
Sherritt is committed to improving its diversity and inclusion (D&I), and in 2020 the company continued to work on building a foundation for its drive towards a more inclusive, diverse and respectful workplace. In January 2020, Sherritt launched a diversity survey to better understand the current level of diversity within its workforce, to build a foundation of data, and to help drive the conversations and actions across the business.
Sherritt is also a member of Catalyst’s 30% Club Canada to achieve better gender balance at the board and executive management levels. We continue to work towards our goal of ensuring that 36% of employees identify as women by 2030.
In relation to our commitment to improve D&I, in 2020 Sherritt signed the BlackNorth Initiative Pledge, committed to the removal of anti-Black systemic barriers negatively affecting the lives of Black Canadians.